Category: News

We’ve recently been reviewed by Nominet for our Accredited Channel Partner compliance. I am proud to announce that we had no issues found, and that our Nominet Accredited Channel Partner status has been extended for another year.

Today virtco® became a registered trademark, notification from the Intellectual Property Office was received at 18:30. The full registration can be viewed on the ipo.gov.uk website by clicking on our registration number: UK00003256449

We’ve recently been reviewed by Nominet for our Accredited Channel Partner compliance. I am proud to announce that we had no issues found, and that our Nominet Accredited Channel Partner status has been extended for another year.

Today I have improved the resilience of our DNS services by upgrading both the primary (London) and secondary (New York) DNS servers to the latest versions. We can now fully support both IPV4 and IPV6 network addresses and name resolution within the same domain structure.

These servers both have our innovative adaptive firewall technology that constantly monitors activity for abnormal behaviour and shuts down connections to the offending party before it becomes an issue.

They’re also monitored 24/7, like all our other servers, to ensure that we maintain our 99.999% up-time record.

The internet services arm of D. Grant Crawley Limited has been known as virtco® for some considerable time now, the name was originally used back in 2005 to denote our new email service.

Since virtco® and virtco.com are an easier to remember brand name than D. Grant Crawley Limited (which is a bit of a mouthful even for me) I have decided to re-brand all the internet-based services as virtco® services. Virtco® is our trading brand name and registered trademark, virtco.com is the main website. The company will remain as D. Grant Crawley Limited.

Other virtco® based brand names you will see in the near future are:

virtcocrm.uk – our customer relationship management offering

virtcoerp.uk – our enterprise resource planning (accounts) system

virtcomail.co.uk – our microsite for email services

virtcoserver.co.uk – our microsite for cloud server hosting

virtco.uk – our customer portal for all virtco® internet services

If you’re already a customer, then keep a lookout for your login credentials to the virtco customer portal. You’ll be able to request new services, cancel unwanted services, view and download invoices, make changes and more…

We have improved the resilience of our DNS services by bringing online our own secondary DNS server. It’s located in New York, USA to provide greater disaster protection, in case there is an unforeseen event in our London data-centre that prevents us from serving DNS records.

This new server has our innovative adaptive firewall technology that constantly monitors activity for abnormal behaviour and shuts down connections to the offending party before it becomes an issue.

It’s also monitored 24/7, like all our other servers, to ensure that we maintain our 99.999% uptime record.

If, like us, you’re fed up of spam and you’re also fed up of services that should block or remove spam not doing a good enough job then you need our Virtco Mail Agent service.

Using the advanced spam filtering technology we developed when we first started the Virtco Hosted Email service, we have developed a new, and innovative approach to scan your mailboxes hosted with other service providers. So if you have an account with someone else and it’s getting bombarded with spam, or worse, then we can clean it out for you on a regular schedule.

With our simple console you enter in the login details for all your IMAP email accounts and our server then encrypts your passwords and stores them in our secure database. The service then accesses your email mailboxes and scans them for spam, phishing emails and viruses every few minutes. You can configure the system to remove the messages, quarantine them in a folder or flag them with a subject line tag that you can then use to filter in your own email software. You can opt for daily, weekly or monthly email reports of what the Virtco Mail Agent has blocked.

We’ve recently been reviewed by Nominet for our Accredited Channel Partner compliance. I am proud to announce that we had no issues found, and that our Nominet Accredited Channel Partner status has been extended.

We have the great pleasure to announce that our VirtcoERP service and customer portal launch today. VirtcoERP is a fully functional ERP system based on the Frappe ERPNext platform, providing advanced ledger based accounting and business management functionality in a fresh, new and innovative way. We use it ourselves for our business operations, and are fully versed in its operation.

We provide the solution on a low rolling monthly cost on a per-company basis.

You can now read about all our Virtco hosted services on this website. Each service has a full description under the Virtco menu, and from each service description you can make contact to request a callback.

It’s been 18 months in the making, we first mentioned it on this website back in May 2013, and we think you’re going to love CaaS. It’s the perfect business partner.

Together with our chosen technology partners ASUS, Google, HP, Microsoft and Ubuntu we can now bring you a fully integrated and functional platform to help you manage and grow your business. Whether your business is a one-person micro entity or a 250 person medium sized business, we have an outstanding range of products and services to ensure that all your business computing needs are met.

Our Compute as a Service (CaaS) offering will launch on 1st December 2014.

CaaS is a new concept in providing computer technology to small and medium sized businesses, we supply, support and maintain all your computing devices. Whether they’re desktop PCs, laptops, tablets, phones or servers (on-site or cloud). You pay a small monthly fee for each device and user – freeing up your capital to run your business.

Services like this have been around a while now, but they’ve been almost exclusively for the largest enterprises. The difference we are bringing to this concept is that a fully managed IT solution is now available to businesses of all sizes from one-man micro entities up to medium sized businesses.

CaaS reduces your total cost of ownership (TCO), removes the need for in-house technical support expertise and frees up your capital to re-invest in your business. With short contract terms it also makes you more agile and able to respond to market needs quickly.

As part of the preparations for our new Compute as a Service (CaaS) offering launch we’ve received ASUS Approved Dealer status. We chose ASUS because they’re one of the most innovative OEMs in the industry, with a good quality record and competitive price point.

Our CaaS offering will be providing selected models from throughout the range of great ASUS products.

D. Grant Crawley Ltd is pleased to announce that we have been awarded Accredited Registrar status by Nominet (the .uk domain name authority). To date there are only 135 of 4,689 Nominet Registrars who hold Accredited Status. This status is only awarded to those registrars who demonstrate that they meet the highest standards set by Nominet. This is an exceptional achievement for us as most Accredited Registrars are the “big” companies in the domain name industry.

It’s live and available right now, just go to https://mail.hostedemail.com and login with your Virtco mailbox email address and password. You may find you like it even more than your installed email software.

Top 10 new features

A brand new look and feel: The new webmail is modern looking, faster and a lot more intuitive.

Mobile sync for calendar and address book: The most awaited feature. Webmail now supports mobile sync.

Conversation threads: conversations can now be grouped together. You have the option to display conversations as lists or threads.

Cloud storage for files: A simple way to manage files. Share, password protect and set an expiry date for the links you share.

More robust RSS reader: the RSS reader is easier to use and manage.

A better HTML mail editor: the new editor offers users more options to format messages.

The new Generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD) schema will add hundreds of new domain extensions to the Internet in the course of the coming years. ICANN, the organization who coordinates gTLDs, has received nearly 2,000 applications from organisations interested in managing their own gTLD.

Applied-for extensions range from geoTLDs such as .london, .berlin or .nyc, and broad generic terms such as .online or .web, to those targeting more specific uses or communities such as .bike, .wiki or .kiwi. While most of the new gTLDs will be sold to the general public just like .com, several hundred organizations have also applied to use their brand name as a private gTLD exclusively within their organizations or by the customers or members who use their services.

Today we have installed a new technology on our primary web server, it automatically detects hacking attempts and then dynamically modifies firewall rules to block the hacker, bot or malware that is trying to break into or exploit the services we provide to our customers.

The benefit to our customers is that the server will no longer be being bombarded by a continuous stream of unwanted network traffic and can serve your web pages faster and without hindrance. Customer web pages are also less likely to be vandalised or exploited by malware or spam bots.

We already have class leading uptime, the server hasn’t needed to be rebooted for the last 311 days, but this evening we did reboot to implement this change and some updates. The server was out of action for less than three minutes, but these changes should mean that the server can resume it’s normal duties of serving our customer’s web pages (and this one) without interruption for at least the next 311 days.